Frankenweenie

Tim Burton – 2012 – USA

Say what you want about Tim Burton, but who else could pull off a black-and-white, stop-motion-animated children’s movie about dead pets, grave-robbing and reanimated corpses?  Burton isn’t in my top handful of favorite working filmmakers, but I’m always interested to see what he does and I enjoy delving into his persistent and unique personal vision each time.  As you may know, this film may be a historic first, a remake of a live-action short film as an animated feature.  Burton’s 1984 Frankenweenie was popular with kids in the 80s, often played alongside other family-oriented programs, and  was famously influential in getting Burton his first feature directing job; Pee Wee’s Big Adventure (1985).  I admit I was skeptical upon hearing of this project, but I thoroughly enjoyed it, probably more than any Burton film since Sleepy Hollow (1999).  As a playfully morbid comedy for young people, everything works superbly, but I can’t help admiring it for purely aesthetic reasons too.  Even though Burton doesn’t reinvent the medium by any means, he demonstrates two key things with this film: #1) that black-and-white cinema is not only strikingly beautiful but hardly box-office poison, and #2) that stop-motion (clay) animation is still – (after all these years of CGI’s dominance) – magnificently solid and three-dimensional, preserving our cognizance of spatial relationships in a way that computer graphics have yet to achieve.  I was also very impressed with how Burton expanded the plot to make it feature-length.  He wisely avoided turning it into a musical, and didn’t just elongate the original’s existing scenes.  He opens up the hero Victor’s world, maintaining a child’s-eye view of a quaint but dysfunctional community, and most importantly stays focused on the story’s key elements.  In other words, we don’t see Victor getting into multiple adventures but instead see the many ways in which his basic experiment – (using electricity to revive his deceased dog Sparky) – has an effect on the people around him.  Some are horrified and some are jealous, and they all end up either imitating Victor’s work on their own or forming a lynch mob to punish his blasphemy.  In this way, a finale of Godzilla-like proportions doesn’t seem insane at all but a logical extension of the film’s themes.